Home > Rafi on the Rails > Archives > 2007 > October > 10 > Entry
Amtrak’s “M” Factor: Marcia and Megan
For all I’ve trumpeted about my Amtrak Adventure around the country, I owe a huge thanks and point of credit to two incredible individuals at Amtrak: Marcia Stockstad and Megan Brandell.
As I mentioned in my intro video back at the beginning of the trip, I cashed in 100,000 Amtrak Guest Reward points in order to take the trip. You’d think that after you’d made the decision to drop that many points (almost ten years in the making), everything else would pretty much be gravy. Not quite.
Now, I’ll be the first to admit it: my itinerary was hardly conventional, snaking around the nation, making a zig-zag out of the midwest. The big problem I ran into when I called Amtrak Guest Rewards to book the itinerary was that the computer system just couldn’t handle it. I ended up calling in three times and got three different answers as to why I couldn’t book my trip. All of those answers were pretty shallow excuses (I’ll refrain from recalling them here in public—they were that laughable), so I called Megan Brandell, who I met in the Washington, DC First Class lounge a few weeks earlier, and who coincidentally works for the Guest Rewards office in Washington, DC. I explained the situation to her, and she was nice enough to forward my story on to the Guest Rewards ticketing office in Minneapolis. Megan, thank you for that favor; it saved me more hassle than you can probably imagine.
A few hours later, Marcia Stockstad calls me from the Guest Rewards redemption center in Minneapolis. Now, Marcia and I already knew each other from previous calls I’ve made to her work center. For some reason for like a year, every time I called I’d get Marcia, and we could never figure out why—it was light a weighted roulette wheel. It’s too bad that wheel stopped working when I wanted to actually book the trip, because I wasn’t lucky enough to get her on the phone during the first three tries.
Anyway, it turns out that Marcia is also one of the most knowledgeable people at the ticketing location (something to which I could have already attested, based on past experiences), which is why the job was handed to her, and sure enough, Marcia knocked the reservation out in a matter of minutes—literally. And when I needed to make slight changes to the reservation over the next few months, again, Marcia was there to help without a moment’s hesitation.
I’m positive that if Marcia wasn’t at that center in Minneapolis, getting my trip booked would have been like pulling teeth, so Marcia, thank you.
Amtrak tells me that they are working on improving the Guest Rewards program—let’s hope that they fix the booking system as part of those improvements. In the meantime, let’s just hope that the powers that be keep Marcia and Megan on board; they have management material written all over them.
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